Shared Worlds: July 16th - 29th, 2017

Celebrating 10 Years of Shared Worlds!

Thank you to all who attended Shared Worlds 2017! Stay tuned for information about Shared Worlds 2018. Applications open this fall.

Shared Worlds is a nonprofit program that does not receive financial support from Wofford College. The amount of funding we award to student each year depends on donations and grants we receive. We do our best to prioritize students with the highest financial need and interest in the program. If you’d like to contribute to make the program possible for more students, please consider making a tax-deductible donation today!

Applications for Shared Worlds 2018 will open November 1st 2017-April 1st 2018. If you’d like to receive email notices about next year’s program, sign up for our e-newsletter.

Shared Worlds is an annual summer program designed for teen writers interested in speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, steampunk, etc.). The students work in groups with an experienced “world-building coordinator” to design and build a world. They also attend sessions on particular aspects of world-building with historians, scientists, authors and philosophers. Within a few days, the students have produced a world complete with its own life forms, languages, laws, and cultures. The students then write stories set in the worlds they have built. Professional writers on the Shared Worlds staff, as well as a number of guest authors, instruct the students in various aspects of creative writing. At the end of the program, the guest authors meet the students individually to discuss their stories; they also provide a constructive written evaluation of each student’s story. Finally, the students’ stories are published annually in book form.

Supported by an Amazon grant and featured by The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, and TheWashington Post, Shared Worlds is a unique writing camp that brings together rising 8th-12th grade students from all over the world. Students work with critically acclaimed and bestselling fantasy and science fiction writers to imagine, build, and write their own stories.

The camp is a great way for students to meet their creative peers from across the country and around the world and publish their work with the help of noted and award-winning authors. Shared Worlds takes the ideas and enthusiasm of young writers seriously, and encourages their creativity in a fun, dynamic, and safe learning environment on the beautiful campus of Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC.

Gwenda Bond writes YA and children’s fiction. Her novels include the Lois Lane series (Fallout, Double Down, and, coming in 2017, Triple Threat), which bring the iconic comic book character front and center in her own YA novels, and the Cirque American series (Girl on a Wire, Girl Over Paris, Girl in the Shadows), about daredevil heroines who discover magic and mystery lurking under the big top. She and her husband author Christopher Rowe will launch a middle grade series, the Supernormal Sleuthing Service, in 2017 with The Lost Legacy.

Her nonfiction writing has appeared in Publishers Weekly, Locus Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. She has an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives in a hundred-year-old house in Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband and their unruly pets. There are rumors she escaped from a screwball comedy, and she might have a journalism degree because of her childhood love of Lois Lane.

Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times Bestselling author born in the Caribbean. He grew up in Grenada and spent time in the British and US Virgin Islands, which influence much of his work.

His novels and over 50 stories have been translated into 18 different languages. His work has been nominated for awards like the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author.

He currently lives in Bluffton, Ohio with his wife, twin daughters, and a pair of dogs.

N(ora). K. Jemisin is an author of speculative fiction short stories and novels who lives and writes in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been nominated for the Hugo (three times), the Nebula (four times), and the World Fantasy Award (twice); shortlisted for the Crawford, the Gemmell Morningstar, and the Tiptree; and she has won a Locus Award for Best First Novel as well as the Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Award (three times). In 2016, she became the first black person to win the Best Novel Hugo for The Fifth Season.

Her short fiction has been published in pro markets such as Clarkesworld, Postscripts, Strange Horizons, and Baen’s Universe; semipro markets such as Ideomancer and Abyss & Apex; and podcast markets (mostly Escape Artists) and print anthologies.

Kathe Koja is an American novelist and playwright. Her books span genres—horror, historical, and YA—and she is also a prolific author of short stories. Koja's work frequently concerns characters who are at odds with society, often focusing on the transcendence and/or dangers which proceeds from this social defiance, as in The Cipher, "Teratisms," The Blue Mirror, the Under the Poppy trilogy, and Christopher Wild. She creates site-specific events with her performance ensemble, nerve.

Koja won the Bram Stoker Award and the Locus Award and was shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick Award. Her prose has been described as "stunning".

Terra Elan McVoy has held a variety of jobs centered around reading and writing, from managing an independent children’s bookstore, to teaching writing classes, and even answering fan mail for Captain Underpants.

Terra lives and works in the same Atlanta neighborhood where her novels After the Kiss, Being Friends with Boys, and Pure are set. She is also the author of The Summer of Firsts and Lasts, Criminal (an Edgar Award nominee), and In Deep.

Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories. She is the recipient of the William L. Crawford Award, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award.

Ekaterina Sedia was born and raised in Moscow, where her parents and the rest of her family still reside.

Her novels —The House of Discarded Dreams, The Secret HistoryofMoscow, and The Alchemy of Stone— are currently available from Prime Books.

Her short stories have sold to Analog, Baen’s Universe, Fantasy Magazine, Clarkesworld, and Dark Wisdom, and have been published in the Japanese Dreams (Prime Books) and Magic in the Mirrorstone (Mirrorstone Books) anthologies.

Over a 30-year career, she has won numerous awards for her editing work, including the Hugo Award and World Fantasy Award. Whether as editor-in-chief for Weird Tales for five years or in her current role as an acquiring editor for Tor.com, Ann has built her reputation on acquiring fiction from diverse and interesting new talents. As co-founder of Cheeky Frawg Books, she has helped develop a wide-ranging line of mostly translated fiction. Featuring a who’s who of world literature, Ann’s anthologies include the critically acclaimed Best American Fantasy series, The Weird, The Time Traveler’s Almanac, Sisters of the Revolution, and the Big Book of Science Fiction (Vintage, 2016).

Staff

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and lecturer. He contributes regularly to the third-party role-playing game magazine Kobold Quarterly. He also writes for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites.

Jones is a board member for The Hub City Writers Project and The South Carolina Academy of Authors. Along with collaborators at the Alzheimer's Association, The Hub City Writers Project, and the Department of Psychology at Wofford College, Jones helped create Living Words, a creative writing program for people diagnosed with dementia and their caregivers.

Jones is a shameless fan of shared world fiction in general and Forgotten Realms in particular, which lead to his creating a pilot of the shared worlds program at a high school in Lexington, KY. His favorite fantasy novelists are R. A. Salvatore, Greg Keyes, and David Gemmell. He prefers Robert E. Howard to J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings, and is still not convinced that one day he won't find the magic doorway to Narnia. He's pretty fond of Greek drama, southern literature, Vietnam War novels, and American nature writing, too.

Jeff VanderMeer is an award-winning novelist and editor, and author of the New York Times bestselling Southern Reach Trilogy—the first volume of which, Annihilation, is currently being made into movie to be released by Scott Rubin/Paramount this year. His latest novel, Borne, will be published by MCD/FSG April 25th, 2017 and has been optioned by Paramount. His fiction has been translated into thirty-five languages and has appeared in the Library of America’s American Fantastic Tales, Conjunctions, and multiple year’s-best anthologies as well as on such sites as Slate and Vulture.

VanderMeer grew up in the Fiji Islands and spent time traveling through Asia, Africa, and Europe before returning to the United States. These travels have deeply influenced his fiction. He is the recipient of an NEA-funded Florida Individual Artist Fellowship for excellence in fiction and a Florida Artist Enhancement Grant. A three-time winner of the World Fantasy Award and fifteen-time finalist, VanderMeer has also won the Shirley Jackson Award and Nebula Award as well as been a finalist for the Hugo Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, the British Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.

In addition to his writing, VanderMeer has edited or co-edited several anthologies, including Best American Fantasy, The Weird, and The Big Book of Science Fiction. His award-winning Wonderbook is the world’s first fully illustrated creative writing book. He also writes for TheNY Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, the Atlantic online, Electric Literature, LitHub, and many others. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, Ann VanderMeer, and two cats.

Tim is Professor of History and Associate Provost for Administration at Wofford, but for twelve of the past sixteen years, he has spent his summers working for the Johns Hopkins University's Center for Talented Youth (CTY) summer academic program as a history instructor and as a site director. He has worked in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York for CTY. In 2008, CTY selected him to direct the inaugural year of the CTY International site in Spain, which was held at the European University of Madrid.

Tim teaches European history at Wofford. His research interest is the intersection of state power and religious reform in sixteenth-century Spain.

From his home in Chicago, Will Hindmarch writes and designs games, books, and essays for page and screen. He specializes in imaginary worlds and interactive storytelling, through everything from podcasts to board games. He helped design the online storytelling game, Storium, to spark new creative writers online. Hindmarch’s work has appeared on shows like Wil Wheaton's Titansgrave and TableTop, and comic books like Munchkin. He co-founded Gameplaywright Press with Jeff Tidball to publish books about the intersection of creative work, gaming, and narrative design. As the assistant director of Shared Worlds, Hindmarch serves as the worldbuilding expert for the camp.